by Douglas J. Lanzo
Copyright 2022
First published in Studio Issue Number 155 (July, 2022)
He told me stories he had never told before:
of magical meetings he had experienced
in the rural town of Easton, Connecticut
where I was raised,
where he met the brilliant and beautiful Helen Keller,
her amazing teacher, Anne Sullivan,
ingenious helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky and
resourceful Subway founder Fred DeLuca, and
of magical moments setting high school track records
and racing car speed records;
he spoke of these life-defining experiences
clearly and crisply, as if they had just happened;
then, he quietly asked me to read him one of my poems
about a person’s life told through the
the prism of a butterfly,
ending in its freed body
being swept out to breeze;
and then he asked me to read it again…
That was the last time we spoke.
Just two weeks later, he unexpectedly passed.
He was my father.